TV Week SUNDAY & W OMEN have a weakness for firefighter Tommy Gavin, the reluctant hero of FX’s “Rescue Me.” Played with a sullen irascibility by creator and writer Denis Leary, Gavin is the kind of leading man that FX, the cable network that airs “Rescue Me,” has made a speciality. Like Vic Mackey, the beyond corrupt cop on “The Shield,” Gavin isn’t particularly likeable. But he does one thing that really turns women on.

He saves lives.

Callie Thorne, the actress who plays Sheila Keefe, the widow of Gavin’s cousin Jimmy, a fellow firefighter who died in 9/11, understands Gavin’s blue-collar mystique all too well. Her character had an affair with him following the tragedy.

“It was highly destructive and very sad,” says Thorne, who was perfectly primed to play the role, having just seen an “Oprah” show on 9/11 widows and the firemen who left their wives for them before her audition. “Tommy and Sheila were drawn together by her husband’s death.

It was based in such despair, it could only lead to tragedy.” Even in the show’s third season, Sheila still holds a torch for Gavin.

“Sheila’s refusing to meet anybody else,” says the actress who was born in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and moved to New York in 1991.

“She’s waiting for him to come back to her.” That will present some problems when Marisa Tomei comes on as a possible love interest for Gavin. Tomei plays Angela DeCarlo, the ex-wife of Gavin’s brother, Johnny (Dean Winters), an NYPD detective. When she and Gavin start dating, Thorne says, “Sheila goes a little haywire, she throws it in his face. I think it’s a pretty exhausting way to live.” Tomei isn’t the only high-profile actress to join the firefighter groupies on “Rescue Me.” Susan Sarandon plays Alicia Green, a glamorous and wealthy older woman who makes a play for the sultry, pillow-lipped Franco (Daniel Sunjata).

“What’s cool about the Sarandon role is that she doesn’t know that Franco is a firefighter,” Thorne says. “She sees him in a bar and thinks he’s cute. She’s just on the prowl.” Thorne thinks women’s carnal attraction to firemen can be attributed to the enduring power of certain male archetypes. “Firefighters, cops and doctors all save lives for a living,” says Thorne, who does double duty as the exwife of the detective Dominic West plays on “The Wire,” the HBO drama that will return with new episodes in September.

“Don’t we all want someone who can come in and save us?

These men have that bravery and they don’t like to be seen as heroes which is also incredibly sexy. They’re brave and strong but who knows if it’s true behind closed doors?”